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Origami may be an ancient Japanese art, but paper-folding has come into its own as part of a bigger move towards paper-sculpting.

Artists ever striving for new forms of expression have sculpted paper to create ingenious, often figurative pieces, exquisitely detailed by hand. But design has taken to it too.

Design Week has been charting the trend among illustrators to create 3D imagery from paper, while installations such that created by Le Creative Sweatshop out of yellow Post-it notes for a fashion shoot for Shoes-Up magazine demonstrate the versatility of paper and it is recyclable. It is a popular choice for the designers of pop-up shops too.

Furniture designers have long experimented with paper and card witness Frank Gehry’s pioneering corrugated Wiggle chair of 1972 for Vitra and subsequent designs. But the creations get ever more intricate, as honeycomb constructions such as Ryuji Nakamura’s Hechima 4 chair made from vulcanised fibre shows.

Fashion designers too have strayed from more traditional fabrics to ply their craft in paper. Designers Ilvy Jacobs and Saskia and Stefan Diez are among those who have designed bags from paper, while Amilia Hrustic’s Plato’s Collection comprises geometric paper frocks intended as stage costumes or for fashion shoots.

These are among the delights to be found in the eagerly awaited Papercraft 2, edited by Robert Klanten and Birga Meyer. Image-led and covering a broad spectrum of work, it is a great source of inspiration, constantly provoking the question, ’How did they do that?’

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